Portrait Project

Victoria Song

MBA 2014

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

I will master my own destiny.

As a young child, I took note of the sharp contrast between the
standards that existed for boys and girls in my stoic, conservative family. My
brother was encouraged to speak his mind, to defend himself, to take on the
world. No one ever expected me to be more than an agreeable, beautiful wallflower.

But I was always a dreamer.

And I discovered a community of other dreamers, of entrepreneurs
who taught me to scratch at the walls and feel the paint peel off slowly under
my fingertips. Little by little, I realized that none of those boundaries were
ever real at all, that anything and everything is possible.

These past two years I forged myself within the halls of HBS – a
community unparalleled in achievement and support. I have anchored my heart and
mind, and now have the strength and clarity to launch the social movement I was
meant to start: So She Did, empowering women to define their own measures of
self-worth, a much-needed contradiction to the flat media messages and societal
images of what makes a woman complete and praiseworthy.

We are each the master of our own destiny, and we need community
to recognize and realize our dreams. I'm now the captain of my own ship, and it
is my dream that So She Did will become a beacon for all other women to chart
their own course.

She believed she could, #soshedid.

— Victoria Song

The Portrait Project

Each year we ask our classmates a straightforward, simple question taken from the lines of a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Mary Oliver.
We share with you intimate and candid responses to this question, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"